Stack Exchange Review, Overview, Features and Comparison of Alternatives

Stack Exchange is an intuitive educational portal which collects questions and answers from sites who collect data on many diverse topics. Ranging from gaming, coding, to gardening and programing, Stack Exchange will offer you easily accessible knowledge that was organized into libraries that offer high-quality questions and answers for any topic you can imagine. But that’s not all. Libraries of questions and answers are only tip of the iceberg.

Stack Exchange also offers help from experts, real-time chat integration, community blogs, help staff everything that you will need to find the answer you are looking for.

How does it work?The sites are free and open to everyone – you can ask or answer questions without even bothering to register. Better yet, you have access to the full archive of existing questions and answers – again, without needing to give up so much as an email address.

What's special about Stack Exchange?You wouldn't shout out a calculus question in a football stadium, right? You'd go to the math department of a university. That's why instead of allowing questions on any topic, Stack Exchange brings together individual communities of experts on very specific topics.

Stack Exchange ReviewCommunity-powered question and answering service for everyone

In 2008, popular computer programming Q&A website Stack Overflow started its life, managing to attract the largest community of programmers in the world who all took advantage of this great service and started sharing their knowledge one with another. Only one year later, Stack Exchange Network was launched with a goal to provide the public with the network of question-and-answer Web sites that each covered topics from many different fields. This experiment made by developers Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky paid off, enabling this network to grow to the size of over 110 websites with their own self-regulating communities and ever-growing user-created content.

Today, Stack Exchange networks offers everyone a singular account that can be used on all 110 question and answer sites, with access to more than 7.6 million questions, 13.6 million answers and 4.3 million users. This covers knowledge that covers anything from Travel Advices, Patents, Cooking, English Language and History, to theoretical computer science and to professional system and network server administrators.

Stack Exchange OverviewStack Exchange become a reality in 2008 when creators of Stack Overflow started a slow expansion of their service with destinations Server Fault (for questions related to system administration) and Super User (for questions related to “power users” who use many computer systems on daily basis). These manually created websites were just a beginning, because in 2009 the framework for Stack Exchange 1.0 was formed, enabling users themselves to create new sites, fill them up with content, and build a thriving communities that will fuel their progress.

Today, with over 110 websites running, Stack Exchange represents the largest network of Q&A websites in the world. With open service that allows everyone to browse all databases, build reputation by helping others, promote (up-vote and down-vote) uploaded content, everyone can find answer to every question. User reputation is not used only for promotional services, but also to enable ordinary users to become more involved in community, earning certain site administration rights and becoming leaders that coordinate Q&A efforts.

To enable better community outreach and connection between user, each of the websites on the Stack Exchange Network features personalized blogs where users can record their thoughts, experiences and observations in the long form.

InterfaceInterface of Stack Exchange websites uses a same formula, with design that reminds us of Digg. Each site features lists of recent and most popular questions pages, with clear indication of user votes, number of answers and views each question had. Same as Stack Overflow, the one and only way of categorizing question is with tags, which can be easily browsed through.

Pages that host the questions are very nicely designed, with commenting system that allows conversation and threading of messages. Each answer can be up-voted or down-voted, shared on Google+, Facebook or Twitter, or improved by additional editing.

Registration and costStack Exchange features a singular login for all of its websites. You can use either Stack Exchange login information (valid email and password), or credentials from Google, Facebook and Yahoo!. Every feature of every Stack Exchange site is freely accessible, without any paid subscriptions.

ConclusionStack Exchange Network is one of the best places on the internet where you can find answers to your questions, no matter how exoteric or specific they are. With great communities collected around various fields, you will most likely quickly find yourself voting and answering many questions you know answer to.